Do you hear a sad trombone sound when you log in to check your 401(k) balance? Do the good people at Fidelity send you condolence cards unprompted?
Yes? Sorry. Then you may want to hear the idea posed by a former Goldman Sachs employee: What if you could borrow money to supercharge your retirement savings?
Do what now?
Abdul Al-Asaad’s startup, Basic Capital, will lend its clients $4 for every $1 they put into their retirement account. What’s essentially going on here: Basic Capital wants people to take out a mortgage for their 401(k).
"I am allowed to finance a Coachella ticket," Al-Asaad told Semafor. "Why can't I finance Berkshire Hathaway?"
Sure. Though this is a little riskier than betting on Warren Buffett:
- Instead of having a retirement account being mostly stocks, Basic Capital's accounts mostly hold loans.
- The interest payments from those loans ideally cover the borrowing costs.
- But to hit their target 10% yield, Basic Capital needs to buy some pretty risky stuff. For context, today's junk bonds only yield 7.5%. This means they're going to need to fish in some sketchier waters.
That isn’t going to dissuade a lot of people
Leveraging your customers isn’t exactly a new idea and the problem Basic Capital is looking to solve with the tactic is very real: The majority of Americans have retirement accounts — and majority worry they can’t retire with financial security.
- A whopping 79% agree there’s a retirement crisis. So it isn’t a bad time for a startup to try getting creative.
- Customers are also understandably going to have a higher tolerance for rolling the dice when the downside takes them right back to where they are now: thinking they’ll never retire.
Al-Asaad, for his part, acknowledges the risks and ultimately hopes to diversify Basic Capital’s accounts to include less-dicey stocks, bonds, infrastructure, real estate, and private assets.
Still, when Basic Capital launched in May, Semafor’s business and finance editor Liz Hoffman said her “reaction was equal parts ‘neat’ and ‘oh, dear.’” Same, Liz. Same.
